Design of a Teleradiology System / 대한의료정보학회지

In clinical surgery, there are frequent needs for communication between the house staff and the attending physician in an emergency situation. It's often insufficient for the house staff to make a decision through the information which is delivered in the form of only voice through the telephone line. To overcome the limitation of voice communication, we have designed an emergency teleradiology system which can be used for emergency surgical and medical decision making. The system can transmit the high quality images of CT, MRI, and other X-ray data using a PC attached to a modem through the conventional telephone line. Progressive transmission adopted in the system enables us to efficiently utilize the band-width of telephone line which is typically very low. The iterative residual coding/decoding algorithm compresses various medical images effectively, and thus fast-transmission of images date helps the house staff to perceive the status of emergent patient and make a fast and correct decision about the patient. The system also satisfies design requirements such as low-cost, ease of operation and interactive image communication including voice. 'Teleradiology system' proposed in this paper has been installed and operated in the emergency care unit of Severance Hospital, and as a result, it is effective in the emergency situations.

Design of an emergency teleradiology system based on progressive transmission

In clinical surgery, there are frequent needs for communication between the house staff and the attending physician in an emergency situation. To overcome the limitation of voice communication through the telephone line, we have designed an 'emergency teleradiology system' which can be used for emergency surgical and medical decision making. This system can transmit the high quality images of CT, MRI, and other X-ray data using a PC attached to a modem through the conventional telephone line. It is based on the progressive transmission system which enables the successive update of a received image. The iterative residual coding/decoding algorithm efficiently compresses the image to maximally utilize the low bandwidth PSTN channels. This system also satisfies design requirements such as low-cost, ease of operation, fast transmission, and interactive image communication including voice. Test results using several CT, MR, and X-ray images evaluate the compression performance, image quality, transmission time and computational time of the coding and decoding processes, thus demonstrate the usefulness of this system in an emergency situation.